Tag Archives: anxiety

Thursday morning, I sat next to my coworker Tammy at a long table in a bland conference room at the Great Wolf Lodge in Wisconsin Dells. It was the start of day 2 of a grueling grantee meeting hosted by the State. State with a capital S. Tammy started to speak.

“You know… I feel like I should say. Actually…” and she stopped abruptly, turning toward me. “No, this is important, this requires eye contact.”

I turned toward her. She started to speak again. “I feel I need to say…” and it was my turn to stop her.

“Hang on,” I said. “This is going to need more than just eye contact.” And I folded my hands over the top of hers.

And we giggled like school girls until the presenter got things going. In Tammy’s words, the meeting had been a “fresh hell” and after several good and several bad trips, this had been our friendship forging battle — Tammy and I are travel buddies, through and through.

On Monday, I brought Tammy four travel sized bottles of lotion. She brought me three quarts of homegrown raspberries for pi(es). I absolutely adore Tammy…

Yet, a year ago I could not have imagined this closeness. Not that I had any real evidence to the contrary. Only imaginary. It’s sad that I let that stop me from road tripping for as long as I did. Let me explain…

Long before I started my new job in the Center for Community Outreach I was already working with my newly beloved crew. Believe it or not, a big part of community engagement involves actually going out into the communities. In cars. Even when the community is kind of far away.

So naturally, for the first year or so of all this traveling, I drove myself. Audiobook all the way. Completely on my own dime. Because… what on God’s green earth was I going to be able to talk about with strangers on a car trip for hours on end??? Nothing. That’s what. So I couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t, anyway.

The emails always came out about carpooling and ridesharing, time tables, and rental reservations, but I never jumped in the pool. I just couldn’t take the plunge. The thought alone made me uncomfortable and panicky. So I begged off, out, or around in whatever way I could. Always some reason or another.

But then came last summer and our first ever “Roadshow” — just me and Sheila making visits to all of our HOPE Consortium partners scattered across five counties and three tribes in Wisconsin’s Northwoods. There was no out. And I was nervous.

I tried to think up topics. What would this brilliant, experienced addictions nurse and director of numerous programs want to talk about with her awkward, sweaty driver? I couldn’t even think straight. I sweat some more. Eyes on the road. Hands at 10 and 2.

And because anxiety is pretty much always the same – pointless – our summer 2016 HOPE Consortium Roadshow was a BLAST. Sheila is incredible and I quickly grew to look forward to our long conversations in the car. It was disappointing when we had to go north up Highway 13 and I had to spend the first 30 minutes alone, stopping to pick Sheila up only once I got to Abbotsford.

After a few trips with Sheila, I thought maybe I’d give it a shot with the rest of the crew on the way north for HOPE Consortium Steering Committee meetings. Nerves struck, of course, before the big day — and each time someone different and relatively unfamiliar was going to be in the car — but each time, my anxiety was all for naught. Every trip has been a great time, a chance to get to know some amazing women just a little bit better.

Sheila was first; she is my mother earth and spirit animal. Then came Kayleigh, Leila, Tammy, Becky, and JoAnna. We’re basically a club of enthusiastic chicken eaters and one vegetarian (seriously – if you ever get the chance to have Reuland’s chicken in Minocqua, you’ll want in the club too). Never a dull moment, never a boring trip. I’ve actually even almost shaken the nerves at this point. Tammy and I went to and from Minneapolis a few weeks ago and had our beautiful (and ridiculous) heart-to-heart in the Dells just last week. Leila and I have been cruising all around the state. Every time is a little bit more awesome.

Shortly before Christmas, Becky and I headed up to Minocqua together – she is brilliant AND drives rather efficiently, it’s lovely to ride with her!

I suck in big social situations — small talk is so hard for me. Weather, Wisconsin, Wisconsin weather… it’s awkward and uncomfortable. But something about the car makes you instantly deeper. Maybe it’s the movement, lack of direct eye contact, road noise. Whatever it is, it lets you go deeper faster, be more genuine, and those are my favorite kinds of conversation. We talk about our families and our relationships. Our work and the communities we serve. We share stories, make jokes, laugh, and eat good food. The car, the long trips, the early starts, and coordinated gas stops and key drops when we get home – it helps us bond. We get more personal and it makes work really, really good.

We especially love the food. the rhino crunch from Lola’s Luncbox in Phillips is probably the best thing of all… besides Reuland’s chicken, as noted above 🙂

When I think back to a year ago and my fear of those long trips, I really feel like I should have known better. I work with amazing women. And everywhere we go together — every county, every tribe, there are more amazing women doing good work. (And men too, but honestly – it’s probably 80% women in this line of work.) I’m always scared, but I’m always wrong. And I’d like to really learn that lesson this time.

Last Thursday, after Tammy’s and my big moment… and four more hours of the lamest meeting on earth, we joined the boss lady for lunch before heading home in our monster truck (because you never know what you’re going to get when you rent and this time, we had quite the beasty, which is extra funny when tiny Tammy is behind the wheel). We were having a great time and I confessed, over Noodles (with a capital N), how nervous I’d been about carpooling for those first couple years. Ronda gaped at me… and Tammy: “Even ME?!” Yes, I was scared… even of Tammy, the newest love of my life. And I’ve still never ridden with Ronda, the best boss on earth.

But I’ll keep riding with Tammy. Someday I’ll ride with Ronda. And I won’t ever turn away from the opportunity to carpool again — not in this line of work. There’s too much to learn and to share and so many miles of road on which to do it.

Technically speaking, it was the egg. But I’m trying to make a point — so we’re going to focus on the long time philosophical conundrum for the sake of today’s discussion.

I struggle with a lot of different mental health concerns. Perfectionism came first and came early. I was young when my parents started a daily routine — hands on shoulders, looking me in the eye, “Rachel… relax” as I stepped out the door to school.

Binge eating came next. I don’t remember my first binge, but I do remember the first time I got caught. I was maybe 9 years old and had a jar of chocolate frosting and spoon tucked away in the filing cabinet I kept in my bedroom.

Legit depression took root in high school and it’s been off and on and off an on ever since. More consistently on than off the older I get. And always a bodily focus – dissatisfaction, disgust, hate.

Anxiety became a problem only very recently — panic attacks post-miscarriage. An entirely new phenomenon, though relatively easy to tamp down in the worst moments with medication and sometimes a well-timed phone call to the just-right person.

A veritable laundry list of interwoven mental health concerns.

Since I started seeing a therapist in college some 15+ years ago, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to unravel the knotted mess. The perfectionism obviously led to the binge eating — but did the depression contribute as well? Or was the depression a result? And while anxiety really became a problem only in the last two years, was there always some of it there? I mean, I’m definitely an introvert and social anxiety has been a constant since I was very young — how did that factor into all of it?

The age old question.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Round and round and round… for years on end. Exhausting. And more importantly, stupid.

Who cares whether it was the chicken or the egg that came first when you’re sitting on a dozen that can hatch at any given time — running and pecking and clucking and so on?! No one. That should be the answer. And when did I realize that? Last week… maybe this weekend. Either way, it wasn’t soon enough.

I struggle with an embarrassingly long list of things. (Honestly, I’ve never felt so embarrassed before talking about these things one egg at a time — the whole carton on display at once? Yikes. Please don’t hate me.) But it doesn’t really matter why. Why doesn’t help. The only thing that matters is what I do, how I deal, the actions I take for the purpose of self care and mental health in the now.

Looking for a cause and solving the root problem is a great plan if you’re dealing with a plumbing issue. Or even trying to do some evolutionary mapping (a la chicken and egg). But it seems that lately, with respect to my mental health, getting stuck in that which-came-first, why-why-why mentality really prevents me from moving forward at all. I get stuck in a place that’s not solution-based, but problem-focused, and I can’t get out. In other areas of my life, I despise that attitude — in work, in personal relationships, when dealing with my physical health. Solutions are where its at. It’s time I took the same tack with my mental health. Enough with the why, the psychoanalysis, the which came first. Freud and the chickens can suck it. I’ve got eggs to deal with by the dozens and I don’t have time for the rest.

As I write this, I’m sitting on the chaise end of an enormous comfy couch located in a gorgeous penthouse suite at the tippy top of the Hilton Hawaiian Village Lagoon Tower in Honolulu, Hawaii. I have a view of Diamondhead Crater and Waikiki Beach through the gauzy balcony curtains. This moment is 100% Facebook-able. Not unlike the large number of other Facebook-able and Instagram-worthy moments I’ve posted since departing the chilly Wisconsin fall in favor of the sandy beaches, aqua ocean, and tropical climes of Oahu early Saturday morning.

I posted about the upgrade to first class on the 6+ hour flight en route from Salt Lake City to Honolulu that Seth gifted to me and the mai tai I was offered the second I sat down. It was super sweet of Seth and definitely a cush way to travel, I think I captured that… but I didn’t describe the anxiety the began to plague me the second we left our house on Friday evening. I didn’t describe the panic it turned into before we boarded that plane in SLC. The heartbeat that wouldn’t slow down, the breaths that became increasingly difficult to take, the feeling that something was stuck in my throat and sitting on my chest, the tears that wouldn’t stop coming, over and over again for almost the entire 6+ hours.

This is what anxiety looks like. (On me, in that particular moment.) Not exactly a new profile picture.

We met our friends in the airport — I quickly confessed my unwavering anxiety to Melissa and she rapidly and genuinely assured me that she loves me no matter what. I believed her. Mostly. But not entirely, because anxiety…

But then again, gratitude, you know? And this place, this vacation, these friends — so much gratitude. And we were in Hawaii, and I was wearing a beautiful lei, and I posted a (tired) selfie with the words “Aloha!” and a smattering of super fitting emoji. I posted a snapshot of our view and showed everyone the perfection that surrounded me. And it was good.

Chris came to join us from his hustle bustle, fancy wedding-in-the-mountains lifestyle on Sunday afternoon and he made dinner plans for us at Roy’s Waikiki. (Have you been there? This sentence, how is this my life?) As we piled into the car and headed down the beach, I felt the panic rise again. There were tears burning the back of my eyes and a tightness in my chest I couldn’t swallow away. There was no reason, yet over pre-dinner drinks Halekulani, Seth put a hand on my back and asked me if I was ok and I lost it. Lost it and couldn’t get it back. There was this picture that Chris took, and it’s nice. But I can see the white knuckle grip my fingers have on my own arms, the strained smile, the panic…

Dinner was lovely. I had a perfectly cooked local butterfish in a deliciously complex orange sauce followed by a few bites of chocolate souffle perfection for dessert. That’s all Facebook-worthy, Twitter-perfect… but the moments in the fancy bathroom spent messaging my mental illness guru (<3 <3 <3) and fighting tears and the constriction in my chest at the table… not those. Those (plus Seth’s, shall we say, insistent urging) were enough to convince me to message my psychiatric nurse practitioner about perhaps calling something in for me — a temporary solution to get me through the flights home before I get back to Wisconsin and into the clinic.

I was so hesitant to take the drugs. Depression is my thing. Not anxiety. This is not me. Was not me? And the Hawaiian restrictions on prescriptions for anxiolytic drugs that wouldn’t allow the local pharmacy to fill the Rx faxed in by my provider (I get it though, Hawaii, I really do — and I’m totally not upset) and the necessity to seek out a walk-in clinic and explain my situation all over again nearly did me in. Fortunately, my sweet husband and amazing friends didn’t give up on me and, with their encouragement, I did what I needed to do to get some help. I went to some weird places and walked some strange roads through Honolulu on Tuesday, but met the “helpers” that Mr. Rogers (the elderly, sweater-wearing, shoe-changing variety) tells us about and got the help that I needed for now.

It was on Monday, as I pondered the absolute absurdity of my goings-on that I thought about all that I was showing and all that I wasn’t and how utterly ridiculous it is for me to know with absolute certainty that that is true about myself, but to constantly and consistently doubt the same must-be-fact about others. We don’t post selfies in the lobby of the Japanese-only (except apparently not because they treated me) walk-in clinic we stumble into while in Hawaii. We don’t become facebook friends with the also Japanese MA who hugged me when I told her I had a miscarriage a few weeks ago and then told me about her own journey through IVF with no success; the woman with whom I shared a surprisingly sweet moment of sadness and mutual understanding. We don’t chat about the kind Walgreens clerk who explained Hawaiian prescription laws and then discussed our mutual love of the Packers and cheese with me while waiting for my sketchy almost-in-Japanese-but-from-a-Hawaii-licensed-prescriber prescription for valium to be filled. Nope. We post the leis and the luaus and the sunset and the smiles. Because those are the things that belong on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and whatever the kids are using these days.

But then again… Tuesday night happened too. And while some of it made it to Facebook, the most amazing bits are relegated forever to my memory because, well:

iPhones, at least in my hands, don’t take pictures of stars. Facebook can’t really capture the beauty of Melissa’s face when she looked up and nearly screamed, completely giddy from altitude and excitement, “is that THE MILK from the Milky Way?!! Am I seeing the milk???” You guys… it was the milk. The faint light of millions and billions of stars in our beautiful and enormous and amazing and mind boggling galaxy. The milk.

But not just that. It was the whole trip. The warm sun and strong breeze on the ground in Kona while we ate lunch overlooking a little harbor. The stop at the little abandoned sheep station for dinner on our way up. The stars, the stars, the stars. I saw Cassiopeia and followed her arrow to the north star. We saw a dusty little nebula, a star cluster that might as well have been fluorescently stained cells in a dish (the feeling that I had seen that before, wow), and even a glimmer of the “nearby” spiral andromeda galaxy.

The next day, we came back to Oahu early and then headed to the Polynesian Cultural Center as Super Ambassadors where our sweet guide Danica took us from island to island where we heard music and helped to make it, watched beautiful dances and shook our hips as best we could when they taught us how. The Maori gave me goosebumps, the Samoans made me laugh hysterically, and the Ha Breath of Life show brought tears to my eyes in a truly good way.

I took pictures in all those places, at all those times. Facebook-worthy, Instagram-perfect pictures — but there’s no way to capture it all. I can show you the pictures, but I can’t show you the best parts. I can’t describe to you how beautiful my friend was when she saw that milk, how happy my husband was to have finally made it to the top of Mauna Kea. There’s no way to adequately explain the feelings, the real meat of the experience.

And that’s really my point I think. I can post things about my miscarriage, my grief over the loss of our first baby, and the consequent (I think) anxiety and panic I’m experiencing. But even if you know, even if you have experienced it yourself, you haven’t had my experience and I haven’t had yours, so there’s a whole depth there, beyond social media and even the words, words, words I share here, that we really can’t cross. Similarly, you have had beautiful experiences — weddings days and amazing vacations, deep and important friendships and tiny perfect moments — and so have I, but again, there’s a depth of experience that make these things so personal, so uniquely our own, that no amount of photo sharing or photo shopping can ever really capture or convey what it meant to be there, to have lived it.

But it can give us a clue — a clue that something is worth digging in over. Several years ago, when a friend of mind posted something hinting at depression, I messaged her. And a couple days ago, when I found myself in that fancy bathroom, we had another nuanced and deep conversation, despite the panic, that was exactly what I needed in that moment. Similarly, Aunt Becky, PhD, saw our pictures of the sunset from Mauna Kea on the Big Island and was reminded of her own sunrise trip to the top of Maui’s Haleakala and shared her own beautiful photos, reminders of another beautiful experience, with me.

Life is so complicated and messy, yet it sets up up for so many moments that are beautiful beyond words. Sometimes we manage to capture some of that beauty and little snapshots of frustration or grief. It’s not the whole truth, though. It can’t be. We can only live what’s real and show the highlight reel. There’s no other way to go about it. And, for me, it’s so important to remember that the beautiful, picture perfect moments are only a very small fraction of the story, but that all of the experience matters.

On Monday night I was in a complete state (as I imagine a genteel southern woman would delicately call the messy ball of anxiety I had become). I went up to our room, took a sleeping pill, and came back down to say goodnight. But my sweet friend Melissa saved me from myself. We went out onto that beautiful penthouse balcony and I sobbed about my miscarriage, the struggle with infertility, the unfairness of it all… the pain, the grief, the self-pity. I unloaded it all. It was not pretty. And then I couldn’t stop apologizing because one of my biggest fears before we left was being the ruiner of vacation — I couldn’t bare the thought of ruining this beautiful trip for people I love so much. Instead, my friend said to me, with the most Melissa-y quiet confidence the likes of which I have never seen in another person, that she was sure we would look back on this trip someday and be grateful for this moment. This moment that felt so ugly and pathetic, yet truly was deepening and strengthening for our friendship. She talked about how well we’ve walked together through the highest of highs (our vacation dossier is ridiculous) and how this was truly our first opportunity to run our friendship through the lowest of lows. She’s right, of course. And those are the things you would never see on Facebook.

"Rachel V. Stankowski considered herself, among other things, a writer. Primarily due to the positive stigmas that accompanied the label, but also because it seemed to excuse some of her more major eccentricities, vanity included."
My brother, also a writer, wrote that about a fictional character. It might have been about me. So I stole it. He's good; maybe I can be too.